Siren of Atlantis

Gregg G. Tallas – 1949 – USA 

This was pretty much the swan song for the cycle of exotic adventure films that were started by Universal in the 40s.  They had already been fading for at least four years.  The jewels of the series were the earliest, done in garish Technicolor, like Arabian Nights (1942), Ali Baba & the Forty Thieves and Cobra Woman (both 1944), but by the end of WWII, they’d been reduced to black-and-white cheapies that were received about as seriously as they were intended, such as the lackluster Tangier (1946).  The splashy color palette is gone by the time we get to Siren of Atlantis, as is the stable of improbable, international genre stars – Jon Hall, Sabu, Turhan Bey, Lon Chaney, Jr. – all except for the greatest of them all; doomed B-queen Maria Montez.  The films are notoriously campy to an almost hallucinatory degree, and it’s fine to enjoy them that way, but the problem with camp is that it tends to make some audiences think that films like these can only be appreciated ironically or not at all.  Siren of Atlantis is a case-in-point.  It’s a moody and dreamlike film that operates completely by its own mysterious logic, which the viewer can either accept or dismiss.  It’s a film about seduction that also seduces, and it’s a film about trances and sleepwalkers that is itself a luxurious, dark reverie.  Modeled on the She template, it tells the story of western explorers stumbling into a hidden, ancient civilization – deep in the Saharan desert – ruled by a glamorous but capricious queen.  As in previous films, Montez is the priestess-ruler who is happy to sacrifice men’s lives according to her whims, using them as lovers when it suits her and having them covered in bronze and displayed as statues when she tires of them.  Montez’s real-life husband, Jean-Pierre Aumont, plays a French Legionnaire who escapes Atlantis with barely his life and is so consumed by his feverish memories of Montez that he attempts to return.  It’s as if the new styles from around the world, from film noir to poetic realism, seeped into the exotica of Hollywood’s back lots and instead of corrupting it, mutated it into a strange new genre than never took off.  Hence, Siren of Atlantis remains alone as a surreal hybrid film depicting a distant world of mirages, irrational compulsions, horror, perverse sexuality and nightmare symbolism.